UNESCO’s Rotten Track Record

If UNESCO is attacked on the grounds that it is helping to prepare the world’s peoples for world government, then … let us by all means affirm it from the housetops. — The Saturday Review, 1952

As a symbol of our commitment to human dignity, the United States will return to UNESCO. This organization has been reformed and America will participate fully in its mission to advance human rights and tolerance and learning. — President George W. Bush United Nations, September 12, 2002

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan, responding to considerable public outcry over a long string of UNESCO abuses, announced that the U.S. was dropping its membership in the organization. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) by that time had accumulated a longstanding record of notoriety for waste, corruption, subversion, and espionage.

Now, after a nearly two-decade absence from the organization, the Bush administration asserts that UNESCO has reformed and it is in the United States’ interest to rejoin this UN subsidiary. Tens of millions of our tax dollars could soon flow into the massive UNESCO bureaucracy to fund a plethora of radical activities. UNESCO is busy worldwide promoting abortion, supporting coercive population control, usurping national sovereignty over historical landmarks and natural wonders, claiming authority over maritime salvage and excavation, and devising new spiritual guidelines for humanity. Most importantly, UNESCO is pursuing a dangerous agenda that aims at establishing its authority as a global school board that will direct lifelong education for every soul on the planet.

Has UNESCO reformed? On January 7, 2003 Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) challenged that claim and introduced a resolution expressing the sense of the Congress that the United States should not rejoin UNESCO. “Those calling for the United States to rejoin UNESCO claim that the organization has undertaken fundamental reforms and therefore the United States should re-join,” said Rep. Paul, when introducing his resolution. “It is strange that in the 18 years since the United States left UNESCO, we only started reading about the beginnings of reform in the year 2000,” he continued. “Are we to believe that after nearly two decades of no change in UNESCO’s way of mismanaging itself things have changed so much in just two years? Is it worth spending $60 million per year on an organization with such a terrible history of waste, corruption, and anti-Americanism?”

Rep. Paul then noted:

Mr. Speaker, even if UNESCO has been “reforming” its finances over the past two years, its programmatic activities are still enough to cause great concern among those of us who value American sovereignty and honor our Constitution. Consider the following as a partial list of UNESCO’s ongoing highly questionable activities:

UNESCO meddles in the education affairs of its member-countries and has sought to construct a U.N.-based school curriculum for American schools.

UNESCO has been fully supportive of the United Nations’ Population Fund (UNFPA) in its assistance to China’s brutal coercive population control program.

UNESCO has designated 47 U.N. Biosphere Reserves in the United States covering more than 70 million acres, without Congressional consultation.

Totalitarianism and World GovernmentAccording to its charter, UNESCO’s purpose is “to contribute to peace and security by promoting education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed for the peoples of the world … by the Charter of the United Nations.”

Noble-sounding words. Almost since its inception, however, UNESCO has been a lightning rod for criticism and bitter debate, due largely to its service as a conduit for blatant Communist propaganda, a forum for virulent anti-Americanism, and an aggressive advocate for radical social engineering. In 1955, Congressman Lawrence H. Smith of Wisconsin described the United Nations and UNESCO as “a permanent international snake pit where Godless Communism is given a daily forum for hate, recrimination, psychological warfare against freedom, and unrelenting moral aggression against peace.”

Anti-Communists, patriotic organizations, and veterans groups had been protesting and documenting the offenses of UNESCO for many years and building the case for withdrawing U.S. membership, but it was UNESCO’s proposed New World Information Order (NWIO) that finally proved to be the last straw. Under the Orwellian NWIO scheme, UNESCO proposed to license and control all journalists, broadcasters, and media personnel worldwide — the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights notwithstanding. This finally got the attention of members of the “liberal” press, who for decades airily dismissed the warnings of UNESCO’s conservative critics. The NWIO provided the critical impetus needed to spur U.S. withdrawal.

The NWIO plan to control the dissemination of all news and information would have put in place globally the kind of totalitarian controls over information already operational in the Soviet Union, Communist China, and every other Communist regime. It is not surprising that the Communist-laden UNESCO would advocate such a program. As far back as 1955, former top Communist Party official Joseph Z. Kornfeder had exposed UNESCO’s subversive role in the world revolution. Kornfeder explained that “UNESCO corresponds to the agitation and propaganda department in the Communist Party. This department handles the strategy and method of getting at the public mind, young and old.” During the 1950s and ’60s a number of congressional investigations revealed the alarming degree to which Communist agents were operating throughout the UN, including its top echelons. In 1956, the Senate Judiciary Committee concluded that “by far the worst danger spot, from the standpoint of disloyalty and subversive activity among Americans employed by international organizations, is UNESCO....”

Is this ancient history, irrelevant to our present situation? Not at all. A perusal of the “reformed” organization’s current programs and agenda will demonstrate that it is following the same subversive course laid down by its founders. So it is worthwhile to recount briefly the largely forgotten rotten pedigree of the organization we are now lavishly funding with our tax dollars.

Key among the UNESCO forefathers were Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, two of the top architects of the UN — who served at the highest levels of the U.S. government as agents for Soviet mass-murderer Joseph Stalin. They and other Reds in our government had a direct hand in appointing Julian Huxley as the first director-general of UNESCO. Huxley, in turn, appointed Communists and Communist sympathizers to top UNESCO posts.

Mr. Huxley greatly influenced the early direction of UNESCO. He wrote in the 1948 book, UNESCO: Its Purpose andPhilosophy: “The world today is in the process of becoming one, and … UNESCO must help in the speedy and satisfactory realization of this process....” Huxley defined the body’s governing philosophy as “a scientific world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background.” According to this chief UNESCO ideologue, “political unification in some sort of world government will be necessary for the definitive attainment” of the next stage in “human evolutionary progress.”

Moreover, Huxley declared, UNESCO would assist in the process of “values clarification” on a global level. According to this pro-Communist, militant humanist: “It will be one of the major tasks of the philosophy division of UNESCO to stimulate … the quest for a restatement of morality that shall be in harmony with modern knowledge and adapted to the fresh functions imposed on ethics by the world of today.” This Huxleyan vision of a UNESCO-stimulated “morality” gained new momentum during the 1990s (during the period it was supposedly undergoing reform), with the help of radical theologian Hans Küng and former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev, the “Butcher of Afghanistan.”

Through the efforts of Küng, Gorbachev, and other spiritual seers, this vision is being realized via the UNESCO-commissioned “Declaration of a Global Ethic,” the Earth Charter, and a mushrooming assortment of UN-related education initiatives.

The UNESCO programs and curricula are leading the way for the world’s children to accept (and campaign for) global government. This is a continuation of the organization’s earliest subversive efforts. A 10-part series for teachers, published in 1949 under the title Toward World Understanding, asserted that “one of the chief aims of education today should be to prepare boys and girls to take an active part in the creation of a world society....” But government schools must stamp out love of country and the family must be viewed as the enemy: “As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only rather precarious results. As we have pointed out, it is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism. The school should therefore use the means described earlier to combat family attitudes that favor jingoism.”

Because of UNESCO’s increasingly brazen advocacy of obviously totalitarian schemes and world government, it came under sustained attack from American patriots. Some of UNESCO’s most enthusiastic supporters refused to back off even a little. The Saturday Review, a liberal-left, pro-UN magazine candidly admitted the UN/UNESCO plan for world government, and defended it in a 1952 editorial, explaining:

If UNESCO is attacked on the grounds that it is helping to prepare the world’s peoples for world government, then it is an error to burst forth with apologetic statements and denials. Let us face it: the job of UNESCO is to help create and promote the elements of world citizenship. When faced with such a “charge,” let us by all means affirm it from the housetops.

Most of the organized one-worlders were shrewder, however. They recognized that if the American people truly realized that all the UN blather about world peace, dialogue, and eradicating poverty and disease was really just a façade to cover an ulterior plan for world government, support for the UN would collapse completely. Consequently, most UN/UNESCO supporters did not follow The Saturday Review’s advice; instead, they lied, and denied there were any plans afoot to empower the UN or to establish world government. They muted UNESCO rhetoric; instead of “world government,” UNESCO now speaks of “global governance,” “global sustainability,” “global initiatives,” “collective world action,” “international law,” and “global norms and ethics.”

More Dangerous Than EverOn March 5, 1990, representatives from more than 150 countries met in Jomtien, Thailand, for a five-day World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA), sponsored by UNESCO, UNICEF, UNDP (United Nations Development Program), the World Bank, other UN agencies, and one-world NGOs. Out of that gathering came two important documents: The World Declaration on Education for All, and The Framework for Action to Meet Basic LearningNeeds. American activists fighting Outcome-based Education (OBE) and other radical education schemes promoted by the U.S. Department of Education were shocked to learn in 1992 that President Bush (the elder) and U.S. state governors had adopted the WCEFA goals, virtually verbatim, in their AMERICA 2000 education plan. The Clinton administration continued the Bush support for the UN’s Education For All (EFA) program, and the current Bush administration is following the same path.

Spearheaded by UNESCO, the EFA calls for a multi-billion dollar, ongoing program ostensibly to educate poor children worldwide. This is an enormous socialist ploy to transfer enormous sums of money to UN bureaucrats and brutal dictators, while building UNESCO into a global school board, with unprecedented resources and authority. UNESCO is now more dangerous than ever. President Bill Clinton tried to take the U.S. back into UNESCO in 1994, but conservatives blocked that effort. It has fallen to a “conservative” Republican president to do what Clinton was unable to accomplish.

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